
I don’t specifically remember the moment in 2014 that I said to myself, “Why in the heck are you still a registered Democrat?” but I had never known anything else. My grandfather was the Democratic mayor of Four Oaks for about 40 years (not exaggerating,) and my dad was a JoCo School Board member in the mid-90’s and then ran for County Commissioner as a Democrat. For more than 35 years, I was simply a Democrat.
And then I knew I wasn’t. I knew I wasn’t a Republican either, so I knew I wasn’t going to do a 180 and completely switch sides. The things that I truly remember getting under my skin were the labels and stereotypes and generalizations of party membership. I was absolutely sick of feeling like people knew who I was simply because of how I was registered, especially when I had grown to see that the marriage of most ideas was typically the best way to solve things legislatively.
We could do it right now with both parties, and for MOST people who claim membership in either party, the labels are just not completely true. Do a quick experiment for me. Think about in your mind right now how you label the “other” party.
Go ahead, I’ll wait.
Did you do it? Did you stereotype a hundred million people in about twenty seconds? My guess is that you absolutely can do that within that time frame.
If you’re a really, really staunch Republican, you just called Democrats “socialist baby-killer atheists who are offended by everything, they want open borders, they want to let people marry trees and animals, they want to take everyone’s guns away, they want to take history away, and they want high taxes because they just want handouts without working for anything.” Did I come close?
If you’re a really, really staunch Democrat, you just called Republicans “gun-toting bible-thumpers who each need to invest in a WWJD bracelet because they thump a bible they can’t read, they actually worship Trump, not Jesus, they put kids in cages, they don’t care about women, they’re racist, and they endorse corporate and political corruption as long as the socialists don’t get anything they want.” Pretty close, right?
Except I just described about ten percent of each party, and a good number within that ten percent are “leaders” in their respective party that think good leadership comes in the form of fear-mongering, lying, gaslighting, and sensationalism. Very few people are so staunchly Democrat or Republican that they can even come close to fulfilling all of those stereotypes.
Did you notice I left education out of my labels for both of them? There’s a reason I did that. And it’s pretty simple, really. Think about this. What do you call the people in the “other” party who champion either charters and vouchers OR public education? Do you have a name for them? Is there a label? I mean, I’ve heard I’m a communist before because I like public education, but I value that assessment about as much as I value used toilet paper.
The point is that nobody really hates the other party because of their stance on education because we all know education HAS to happen in one form or another. There are some who are hateful, sure, but most people simply want what’s best for their children and our society.
But education will ALWAYS be the biggest line item in a state budget, and since we’re currently so divided, shouldn’t it be a bigger part of my earlier stereotypes? The answer to me is no, and I don’t think it ever will be. I truly believe that, because there is a VERY simple piece of common ground on which we can ALL stand. The rest of the stereotypes don’t have something this universally acknowledged and agreed upon.
Everybody knows that education is a necessity, and most everybody knows that when you have an educated society, you have a more prosperous, well-behaved, economically-advantaged populace. Plus, there are fewer fear-mongering words you can associate with it. “Public school lover” just doesn’t have the same ring as “baby-killer,” you know?
For now, let’s go back to the stereotypes and address the question posed in this blog title. How in the HELL do 330,000,000 people fit into those horrendous political party stereotypes we just uncovered? The simple answer is that they don’t. Let’s look at three make-believe people and see if you can figure out which party they belong to.
- Wanda is a thirty-four year old black woman with two kids, a husband, a job as a loan officer, an active role in her church, and she recently got a concealed carry permit because she got robbed one time at the bank and that’s not happening again. She also has a gay brother, a disdain for people who try to get by on the government’s dollar, and a grandmother that lives with her because medical bills bankrupted her. To which party does she belong?
- Alfredo is a fifty-eight year old Hispanic man with three grown daughters – one of whom has had two abortions – and his wife died of breast cancer two years ago, leaving him alone but with a $500,000 life insurance policy to warm his pillow at night. He has turned into a man of the night (or swipe,) dating new women as often as possible, cursing the price of Viagra, and sitting in the confessional three times a week as a way of self-enabling his playboy lifestyle. He does not like black people because one of his daughters married one. To which party does he belong?
- Elmer is a balding white man of slight stature who is becoming increasingly angry at the plight of history in America. He is in a nursing home now – though in his heyday, he was a valiant hunter – and he often wastes the day away watching videos of his many hunting adventures, most of which weren’t very successful. Phonetically, he is still a troubled man, and this lifelong problem has only exacerbated the lengths to which he will go to take his anger out on others. As you might imagine, he is a rather difficult resident at the nursing home, especially when he pretends to talk to rabbits. To which party does he belong?
So, there we have three people, all different in wonderful, unique ways. We have Wanda, who I actually could see stepping out of an office at the bank and filling a robber full of bullets. I can see Alfredo sitting at the coffee shop with a divorcee, sneaking glances at his phone under the table to see which way he should swipe. And Elmer and his worsening dementia, just watching the clock tick away til death.
But the question is, in the world we live in, where everybody has to be labeled by their political party, which one of those three is the atheist socialist baby-killer? Which one is the Bible-thumping gunslinging white supremacist? Do you think one of them is – heaven forbid – politically unaffiliated?!?!
Here is where I say something that is very un-political-candidate-like. Who gives a flying shit? Seriously? We stopped getting to know people when we realized labels were easier. We decided that only TWO sets of labels were enough for 330,000,000 people. That is absolutely ridiculous, and if you continue to use labels to place people into these two immovable boxes, we will continue to grow more and more divisive and more and more at odds with people we presume to know simply because of how they choose to register.
We are MUCH bigger and MUCH better than this. Neither of these parties perfectly defines me, especially with those disgusting labels I attached to them earlier. And no matter how much I might disagree with you, neither party defines you either. So who gives a flying shit what party we belong to? We’ll NEVER find common ground when all we have is assumed hate.
And by the way, the last guy above is Elmer Fudd. I just assumed that by now he would be in a nursing home. I don’t know why I picked Elmer Fudd. I guess because he never did kill the wascally wabbit and it just felt like a very unaffiliated thing for him to do.
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